Joseph Smith was a lying SOB. He lied (proven) about translating Egyptian hieroglyphs. He wanted to screw his wife's friends, (and did, much to her dismay). If Mormonism makes people behave, who otherwise wouldn't, fine. But don't lie about it's origins. He was a total fraud. For decades they discriminated against other races, and still do against gay people and women.

Insufferable know-it-all. It is objectively immoral to kill innocent babies. Please stick to the guilty babies.

(10-09-2017 01:16 PM)ImFred Wrote: The only good reason to talk to a Mormon for that long is to get on the receiving end of a (supposedly) virginity saving blowjob.

Sometimes they will mow your yard. Not a metaphor or anything, they will just sometimes literally do yardwork for you.

And help you move. The last two times I've moved, I've had Mormon missionaries help me out for free (I gave them pizza). In grad school, my gaming group was entirely made up of Mormons, so when I moved, they got me missionaries to load the uHaul. Likewise, when I moved from a temp job, I worked for a guy who was also the Bishop of his Ward; he brought over his missionaries to help load the uHaul.

Each time I move, I get more literature in return for their help with loading the truck. And I've put it to use:

(31-07-2017 11:03 AM)Aliza Wrote: Duh. The Jews today aren't the real Jews. They're pretenders who are genetically European. That's why they have no historical claim to the land that no one wanted until the fake Jews started moving there.

I'm curious about the difference between real Jews and fake ones, and what exactly gives anyone a historical claim to any land.

I’m sure you’re asking rhetorically since, if memory serves, you’re working on your PhD in Middle Eastern religions. Surely you're well aware that Judaism passes from mother to child and that Jews do maintain that their cultural heritage traces back to the Hebrews of the Tanakh. I’ll still try to answer the question, and by the way, if you have academic sources that discount my answer, I'd love to hear about them because I'm way more exposed to the Jewish position on this than I am to any other position.

The Jewish people have an unbroken chain of heritage dating back to ancient texts that we believe define our culture. We have maintained a diet, religion, language, mode of dress, and mode of living dating back to at least the time the Jews occupied Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. The argument that the Jewish people should have possession of our land is founded in our stance that the land was taken from us (it was not surrendered or sold) and we want it back. We have maintained a distinct culture for 2,000 years and have repeated a uniform message throughout that entire time: Jerusalem is our holy land, our home, and we intended to return there. No other people have laid roots in the land, established a unique-to-the-land culture, religion, or society. In fact, no other people occupied the land for any substantial period of time or with substantial population at all. The only other contender that I'm aware of has no cultural or religious link to the land.

The British, who had possession of the land, determined that it should be returned to its former occupants.

(29-07-2017 11:14 PM)Aliza Wrote: What exactly do you stand to gain from "getting through to them?" If they're happy and living good lives, and as you said, they're really nice people who deserve respect, then why do you feel the need to intervene in their way of thinking?

(I did read your entire post, btw. I appreciate that you can be kind to people who are soliciting their religious beliefs to you.)

Because people's beliefs don't live in a vacuum, they effect their actions.

And the further from reality those beliefs are, the more likely they are to make bad decisions, in the real world, based on those beliefs.

For example: the Mormon Church in Utah were of the leading financial contributor to defeat the marriage equality proposition in California. Based on unsupported Mormon beliefs.

M'kay. These Mormons were described as being polite, nice, and worthy of respect. Personally, I don't need to make people feel the way I do about subjects of the heart. That's a fundamentalist mindset.

Corruption in the higher rungs of the Mormon church is separate and aside from the moral compass that drives the average Mormon kid on their mission.

(29-07-2017 09:20 PM)TSG Wrote: Anyway, they assured me that Joseph Smith was just one of a list of many prophets whom God had sent to get people to repent and turn towards the just path. We listed some of the prophets, but then Elisha mentioned how Noah was telling people to repent before the flood. Having just read the Genesis flood myth a few days previously, I knew that this was inaccurate. The idea of Noah going around and trying to get people to repent is a modern tradition -- a revisionist fantasy that has no scriptural basis, much like the idea that the serpent in the garden of Eden was Satan in disguise.

It doesn't have to be written down in Genesis to be religious tradition. The ancient Palestinian Jews of Jesus' day had a different approach to literary reverence than modern Christians. This is especially true in areas of the Pentateuch that are thin on detail, as is the case with the Noah story.

Quote:I said that I could not recall the part of the story where he had tried to get people to repent, and so they tried to look for it. Vincent took out his physical Bible and Elisha scanned the verses on his tablet. They searched for several minutes, and, sure enough, nowhere does it say that that Noah was trying to get people to keep the commandments.

At the time of Noah in Genesis there aren't yet any commandments. There was only the Adamic covenant in which God asserted his authority to be the judge over Man.

Quote:I also pointed out there were hardly any commandments to keep at this point:

Yes, there weren't any at all yet. Well, the only implicit commandment at this point in Genesis is to obey God.

Quote:I asked them who wrote the Bible, and was impressed (for whatever reason) that they confessed that many people wrote it over many years. It was at this point that they explained that their church prefers the KJV over any other versions, because they believe it most accurately conveys the ideas of the original texts. I asked, jokingly, why believers didn't just learn ancient Hebrew and Greek.

You should be more specific: who wrote the Pentateuch? Jewish tradition was that it was written by Moses... textual criticism tells us it's a progressive text written by at least 4 or 5 authors. Ask them why they chose to write in such a primitive language when there were perfectly good highly developed written languages like Greek that are perfectly clear and leave no room for ambiguity all these millennia later. Oh, and ask them when the Pentateuch was written: there is no evidence of Hebrew as a written language in the 2nd millennia BC...

The KJV is 80% the Geneva Bible verbatim - why not just read that?

Quote:Besides, after Jesus' resurrection, they continued, he traveled to the Americas and preached to the Nephites and Lamanites in person.

He also travelled to India, according to other traditions.

Quote:Seeing as how it is thus impossible to examine the original sources from which the BoM was allegedly translated, I asked them to clarify if translations of the BoM into other languages used the English version, which they confirmed. I reminded them that the KJV was translated from various sources in the "original tongues", and that second-hand translating leaves much meaning and nuance lacking.

Well, it was mostly just copied from the Geneva Bible... but yes its mandate was to prefer the Hebrew and Greek texts over the Vulgate.

Quote:They had never even heard about the Biblical Apocrypha, which, I assume, isn't unusual among most Christian sects.

Most Christians know of the Apocrypha - heck it's in the 1611 Authorised Version.

Quote:My very last question concerned what was without a doubt the clearest and most demonstrable contradiction with reality that I had found in the BoM: the pièce de résistance, as it were: 1 Nephi 18:25, once Nephi and his family land in South America:

Quote: And it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise, as we journeyed in the wilderness, that there were beasts in the forests of every kind, both the cow and the ox, and the ass and the horse, and the goat and the wild goat, and all manner of wild animals, which were for the use of men. And we did find all manner of ore, both of gold, and of silver, and of copper.

It is an undisputed historical fact, verifiable through virtually endless sources of evidence, that prior to the arrival of Europeans about two millennia after this story is supposed to take place, there were no horses, asses, oxen, or cows in the Americas.

I don't know what species are native to the Americas (except Bears, Beavers, Wolves, and Deer), but cattle is domesticated from the now-extinct aurochs. Cattle could not have existed in the wild without being introduced. And aurochs didn't exist as they'd been extinct for two centuries by the time of Joseph Smith!

Quote:In fact, I forgot to mention another little scriptural hiccup. I had just read through Exodus and I noticed that little 10 Commandments hiccup in the narrative. I asked them what the 10 Commandments were, and of course they starting listing off "Don't kill, don't steal." I informed them that in Exodus itself those commandments are not reffered to as such, and are not explicitly stated to have been carved in stone. If you don't know which one I'm talking about, this should explain it:

Ex 34 is not the 10 Commandments. It is true that the phase "ten words" appears in that passage, but they are just other commandments. The 10 Commandments are in Ex 20 and Deut 5. Now that's not to say they were really written down on stone tablets - Moses was not a historical figure so those tablets never actually existed. But arguing that the phrase "ten words" used in a different context refers to the specific 10 Commandments written on stone tablets in the narrative is nonsensical. It makes no more sense then to argue that the person in Col 4:11 is Jesus of Nazareth just because his name happens to be Jesus.

Quote:They seemed quite shocked about the whole affair and said they would look into the matter later. This wasn't specific to Mormonism -- I wanted to ask any Christian about it. My guess is it's something like the Noah affair, where common tradition says he preached, even though it doesn't say that anywhere. I guess someone somewhere made a mistake, and no one bothered to go and check.

Again, no, Ex 34 is not the 10 Commandments. You might be able to catch some Christians off-guard with that argument, but it can easily be shown that first century Palestinian Jews revered the commandments as per Ex 20. In fact so does Jesus of Nazareth as he specifically quotes from several of them in Mark 10:19. Just because the phrase "ten words" appears in Ex 34 doesn't mean it's the 10 Commandments any more than the name Jesus appearing as a companion of Paul in Colossians means it was Jesus of Nazareth. Remember, Hebrew was an extremely primitive language, it didn't have punctuation of any kind or vowels. Working out where "proper nouns" appear is not as straight forward as finding two words together. Greek is a very different matter - literally every manuscript has the Nomina Sacra in it throughout for example a concept that didn't exist in the Old Testament.

Anyway, I'm surprised to hear they don't believe in hell. Actually not that surprised, but Jesus specifically taught about it. Next time you see them ask them to explain the The parable of the rich man and Lazarus to you. It seems pretty clear that Jesus believed in a hell, and taught about it.